In Germany at Amazon: http://goo.gl/ebRmw
"Bangkok, also known as Krung Thep or the City of Angels, is an almost-perfect
setting for noir fiction, films, music and paintings, and the artistic movement
known as Bangkok Noir. Between the gangsters, the beautiful girls, the vibrant
nightlife and the gigantic scale of the city itself, full of its diverse
millions and their struggles, the lurid and colorful world of Bangkok's
notorious nightlife is brought to life in Chris Coles' series of
Expressionist-style paintings. Broad, sweeping lines and strong, contrasting
colors dominate in these artworks, portraying a chaotic, edgy world of
colliding intention and misplaced desire -- lives out of balance, male-female
compulsion, alienation and disassociation. At once beautiful and frightening,
this collection of paintings is a vibrant celebration of psychedelic Bangkok and
its many shades of noir."

"Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who divides his time between Bangkok and
the coast of Maine. His Expressionist-style paintings are jagged emotional
portraits that reveal a raw and primitive layer of the human experience. After
graduating from Brown University, Chris received a Watson Fellowship to spend a
year living in the Bajuni Islands off the coast of East Africa. He is also a
graduate of the British National Film School and has taken art courses at the
Otis School in Los Angeles. Films he has worked on include Chaplin,
L.A. Story, Rainbow War, Sirens, Cutthroat Island and Superman."

Chris Coles is an artist and filmmaker who
lives in Los Angeles and Bangkok, Thailand. His paintings, in the Expressionist
style, are jagged emotional portraits, revealing a raw and primitive layer of
the human experience. They are part of the Expressionist movement which
has its roots in the Germany of the early 1900's.

Many of the European Expressionists
experienced the slaughter of the First World War at close hand and they often
viewed the world as an edgy, dangerous place filled with ill-intention and
alienation, mankind directly linked to a primordial past of predatory ancestors
roaming primal swamps, forests and plains where bugs, reptiles and animals, the
plants and the earth itself were caught up in a constant and endless struggle to
devour, reproduce, evolve and survive.

The Expressionists often painted their vision with dark lines
and clashing colors rather than the soft images and harmonious tones of the
Impressionists who preceded them. Their paintings were
disconcerting and sometimes offensive, more harsh than pretty. The goal
was to prod and wake up rather than induce a state of aesthetique relaxation.

The paintings of George Grosz, Emil Nolde,
James Ensor, Max Pechstein, Oscar Kokoschka, Alexei von Jawlensky, Egon Schiele,
Ernst Kirchner, Max Beckman and Otto Dix often shocked and were sometimes
banned. In the 1930's, Hitler ordered many of them destroyed as degrading and
degenerate. Along with Stalin, he wanted only positive realist paintings of the ideal and shining man, a
sunlit world filled with uplifting thoughts. In their way of thinking, the actual brutality of their
lives, actions and times was not a proper subject for art.

But almost a hundred years later, the insight
and brilliance of the Expressionist vision lives on, true to the ongoing
struggle and clash of human existence on a planet in constant and violent
transformation, expressed in strong colors and distorted lines, swirling
patterns, allowing us a glimpse into the true nature of our lives and our world
as they actually are, not as we would wish them to be.

Click here
to watch some music videos of Chris Coles Bangkok paintings.